What Shall We Do With Our Homegrown Peanuts?

In This Post we planted some Schronce's Deep Black Peanuts in the garden.
In This Post we harvested them, and
In This Post we dried them.

Whatever shall we do with them now?  Well, we will eat them, of course, but how? Benjamin and I decided that we would parch (roast) one tray to snack on and with the other tray, we would make homemade peanut butter.  We always called them 'Parched Peanuts' growing up, but based on what I read, parched and roasted means the same thing.

Let's get the ball rolling.  We poured the dried peanuts into two baking trays and positioned the peanuts where they were only one layer deep.

Two trays of peanuts

We preheated the oven to 350 degrees and put the baking trays into the oven, setting the timer for 25 minutes.

Lovin' in the oven

About 18 minutes in, the house filled with a warm, soothing aroma of parched peanuts.  I opened the oven door to check on them and that proved to be a mistake. The kitchen filled with a little smoke coming off the peanut shells.  We didn't want them to burn, so I turned off the oven and pulled one out to test, while leaving the peanuts in the oven until the 25 minutes expired.

Parched peanuts

While some of the peanut shells look scorched, the peanuts inside were just fine, roasted, toasted, parched (or whatever you want to call them) to perfection!  We snacked on a few and then decided to shell one of the trays to make peanut butter. The first thing you do is remove the peanuts from the shell.  Then you remove the skins from the peanuts.

In the photo above and those following, the skins look black.  They aren't burnt. These are Schronce's Deep Black Heirloom Peanuts.  The peanuts themselves aren't black - the skins are.

Removing the Shells

Shelling the peanuts is the easy part.  Removing the skins is the time-consuming step.  Apparently, you don't want the skins in peanut butter.  We removed them by rolling them around in our fingers until the skins came off.

Benjamin skinning the peanuts

While we got most of them, I'll admit that my patience was growing thin toward the end.  Finally I told Benjamin, "Hey, look, I bet a few skins in our peanut butter isn't going to hurt anything."  One baking tray of parched shell-on peanuts yielded just over a cup of (mostly-skinned!) nuts.  They smell so good!

Deez Nuts!

Now comes the easy part.  Simply put them in a food processor and add a little olive oil and kosher salt.  Put the lid on the processor and pulse.  Check the consistency of the peanut mixture and add more olive oil until you achieve the viscosity you are looking for.

A little oil, a little kosher salt...

In a few minutes of pulsing, we had achieved the pinnacle of peanut perfection.  A dark brown roasted peanut butter ready to eat!  

Our work here is done!

Now most store-bought peanut butter is light brown.  Ours is very dark.  I'm not sure why, but I assume the reasons are two-fold.  First, our peanuts were parched, so the peanuts we used to make the peanut butter were darker in color.  Secondly, the black-skinned peanuts I left in probably made color darker as well.  Who cares what it looks like - it tastes great!

I took a butter knife and took a big mound of freshly made peanut butter and slathered it on top of a piece of bread:

Once I had spread it out evenly, it was time to eat.  I gave a portion to Benjamin, a portion to Tricia, and I ate the rest.

Peanut Butter Open-Faced Sandwich

Delicious!!  The one cup (plus a little bit) of peanuts yielded about a third of a pint of homemade peanut butter.  I placed it in the fridge.  Today I picked up some chocolate and I'll get out the homemade peanut butter, and...

There used to be a commercial for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups where a guy eating chocolate ran into a girl eating peanut butter.  "Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!"  "Hey, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!"

Image Credit

I'm going to recreate that commercial tonight.  That sounds good right about now!